The award is granted by the initiative Czexpats in Science to budding Czech researchers who are working abroad while maintaining contact with the research community back home. It highlights the benefits of the expertise and experience gained abroad for the development of Czech science and research.
Award for scientists with global impact
Monika Čechová studies repetitive DNA sequences. These are the parts of the genome that play an important role in organism evolution and functioning. At the Czexpats in Science awards ceremony, she gave a lecture on “Genomics of the future: complex DNA parts and their inheritance across generations”, in which she presented the revolution in DNA reading related to new technology, including nanopore sequencing.
“I am thrilled about the award. The Czexpats community is really great; it provides a huge amount of enthusiasm, inspiration and desire to develop Czech research,” said Čechová, whose professional career is closely linked to Masaryk University. She graduated from Applied Informatics with a focus on bioinformatics at the MU Faculty of Informatics before earning her PhD at the Pennsylvania State University in the US. She has recently returned to the Faculty of Informatics from UCSC, where she worked as a postdoctoral fellow and participated in deciphering the Y chromosome – the missing piece of scientific knowledge of the human DNA.
As Čechová stated in a recent interview, now that she is back in the Czech Republic, she wants to focus on strengthening the local bioinformatics community and establishing new collaborations. She remains involved in the international projects she started during her time in the US as well as in science outreach: on 24 April, you can come and see her at the TEDx Masaryk University. Her goal is for everyone to one day have access to their complete genetic information as the cornerstone for personalised medicine of the future. “I would like the answer to the questions ‘What can we learn from our DNA?’ and ‘What does bioinformatics do?’ to become general knowledge” she says.
Among this year’s laureates is also Jakub Drápal, a criminologist and lawyer who uses quantitative methods to examine how sentences are imposed in post-communist Europe and why a suspended sentence has become the most common form of punishment in the Czech Republic, although it was originally meant to be the exception. He recently returned from the Dutch University of Leiden to the Institute of State and Law of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Law of Charles University. In addition to his research, he is also working on proposals to reform the Czech penal policy.
The third laureate was Stanislav Fort, an artificial intelligence and machine learning researcher focused on making large language models safer, more resilient and better aligned with human values. He received his PhD from Stanford, worked at Anthropic and Google DeepMind, and is currently running his own startup project in San Francisco and Prague. In addition to his research, he also helps to popularise artificial intelligence and serves on the advisory boards of the Czech president Petr Pavel.
In addition to the financial prize, all winners received a unique glass statuette symbolizing the logo of Czexpats in Science by the Czech designers Tomáš Kučera and Klára Janypková.
Science without borders
The Czexpats in Science platform brings together Czech scientists working abroad and their award was established in 2023 in cooperation with Diana Biotechnologies. This year, the award ceremony took place outside Prague for the first time and was hosted by Masaryk University, which welcomed the laureates in the majestic Sir Roger V. Scruton assembly hall in the MU building on Komenského náměstí.
Masaryk University has a long history of supporting ties with Czech researchers working abroad. Events such as this one represent an opportunity to share the opportunities for coming back or starting a collaboration that Brno offers to these researchers, as confirmed by the Vice-Rector for Research and Doctoral Studies of MU Šárka Pospíšilová: “It is a great honour for our university to host this award ceremony. Science and research are among our priorities. I hope it is visible both in our results and in what we try to do for our researchers.” She also invited Czech scientists abroad to consider the opportunities offered by MU including the MASH (MUNI Award in Science and Humanities) grant.
The event including a debate with the laureates, which highlighted the benefits that the return of researchers to the Czech Republic brings for the Czech research community. Research is inherently international and the mobility of researchers is crucial. The main message of the evening was advancing scientific knowledge at all levels of education, often starting with secondary school. All you need is a group of motivated learners who are given the opportunity to work on real-life meaningful projects; every bit of progress counts, no matter how small. This year’s laureates view this as one of their missions in education.